Lager, don't worry about Eyelids...he just follows on with Lefty memes..monkey see..monkey do....

06-07-2008, 08:22 PM

wilbur

Quote:

Originally Posted by megimoo

[SIZE="2"]The War on Common Sense

Watching young people compile and try to display knowledge in a college classroom is similar to watching an epistemological famine.

I can say this as an adjunct professor in college and university systems since 2002. Their lack of knowledge is not a reflection on any one college or university but on the overall political and intellectual climate of late 20th and early 21st centuries.

My students, and with few exceptions the students of my colleagues, are the fruits of a garden planted with the intention of producing only identical fruit. As a guarantee to that end, the plants in this garden have been pruned of their trust in innate knowledge, i.e.,

Since common sense was not something the 20th century Left could easily regulate or control in academia, they took the path their ideological heroes had always taken when they came upon a nonconforming person or idea: they sought to eliminate it altogether. This effort, the war on common sense has tempted people of all ages and from all walks of life to question the validity of conscience and the greatness of this nation.
A Darwinian worldview now dominates the classroom. When was the last time the word "teleology" was used in a university classroom in a non-pejorative sense? Teleology, the study of the evidence of order or design in nature, was once a staple in classic Western education.

Actually, both teleology and epistemology get brought up regularly in my western culture class I am taking over the summer.

Quote:

Perhaps it is still used in philosophy when studying the thought of Thomas Aquinas or by the rare but much needed conservative professor, but usually the word is not employed unless it is being used to mock the ignorance of someone who claims to see design (and by extension the evidence of a Designer) in nature.

Epistemology:theory of knowledge,"What is knowledge?", "How is knowledge acquired?", and "What do people know?"

So what is this guy trying to advocate ID?

No one gets mocked for claiming to see design in nature. Most people cannot but help but notice some semblance of a type of 'design'. They get mocked when they try and remake creationism as a scientific theory to get around constitutional restrictions and expect some of the smartest people in the world to fall for the pathetically transparent bait and switch scheme.

06-07-2008, 08:28 PM

megimoo

Quote:

Originally Posted by megimoo

"So one elephant having a trunk was odd; but all elephants having trunks looked like a plot."!

Nature adapts the organ to the function, and not the function to the organ
– Aristotle "!

"The fifth way is taken from the governance of the world. We see that things which lack knowledge, such as natural bodies, act for an end, and this is evident from their acting always, or nearly always, in the same way, so as to obtain the best result. Hence it is plain that they achieve their end, not fortuitously, but designedly. Now whatever lacks knowledge cannot move towards an end, unless it be directed by some being endowed with knowledge and intelligence; as the arrow is directed by the archer. Therefore, some intelligent being exists by whom all natural things are directed to their end; and this being we call God."

The fifth of Thomas Aquinas's proofs of God's existence was based on teleology.

Voltaire said that, at best, the teleological argument could only indicate the existence
of a powerful, but not necessarily all-powerful or all-knowing, intelligence.

06-07-2008, 08:52 PM

Gingersnap

Blinky got pwned again, I see.:p

06-07-2008, 09:22 PM

AmPat

Quote:

Originally Posted by Lager

LOL....You are entertaining, and for that, I am glad you have returned.

A study of the history of opinion is a necessary preliminary to the emancipation of the mind.
- John Maynard Keynes

We should be eternally vigilant against attempts to check the expression of opinions that we loathe.
- Oliver Wendell Holmes

Opinions are formed in a process of open discussion and public debate, and where no opportunity for the forming of opinions exists, there may be moods—moods of the masses and moods of individuals, the latter no less fickle and unreliable than the former—but no opinion.
- Hannah Arendt

What about Supreme Court opinions, do you think they are not worthy of study?

Or the opinion of college professors who profess theirfavorite opinions on defunct theories to the exclusion and derision of others?:cool: